The engineering of an automotive vehicle involves the development, test, and integration of a variety of complex vehicle systems. Quite often, entire divisions of automotive companies and their larger suppliers are devoted to a single one of these vehicle systems. Powertrain, suspension, and chassis are three such examples; steering is another. Today, engineering of the vehicle and the integration of these systems is heavily reliant on the use of computers, with computer-aided engineering, design, analysis, manufacture, and test programs becoming more and more widely used. These computer-aided tools all use data, some of which may come from databases, and produce data, some of which may be used by subsequent computer-based tools to further the overall engineering process. As the quantity and diversity of data in this engineering environment continues to increase, and as the ability of these tools to utilize that engineering data continues to increase, the complexity involved in managing the data also increases, both in terms of accessing the data and converting the data structures (and formats) that are usable by any particular computer-based tool. This is especially true where the source data comes not simply from relational databases, but from other data sources such as spreadsheets, documents of all types, legacy databases, and proprietary files produced by computer-based tools and automated test equipment. Such data is not only diverse in its structure, but is often highly distributed over various networks that may only be connected together via a global public network such as the Internet or a VPN implemented across the Internet.
The problem is further complicated by the need to accommodate the different platforms available to the end users in running a particular engineering application. For example, particular computer-based engineering packages may be deployed both directly on user workstations and separately via a web interface. This requires the ability to deliver the same types of data through different user interfaces.